A recent New York Times story highlights a discouraging trend in American politics: the rise of the imperial president, where the chief executive has the power to do pretty much whatever he chooses. The NYT story predictably focuses only on Donald Trump and his power-expansion plans should he regain the White House. A more honest report would have included Barack Obama—President “I have a pen and a phone”—and Joe Biden, both of whom exacerbated the trend.
The story begins, “Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.”
Trump’s goal, according to the report, is to bring all of the administrative branch of government, including “independent agencies,” under the president’s direct control. That would allow the president to impose his policies and fire at will any political appointee as well as those having anything to do with policy.
Trump claims this is the only way to remove the “deep state.” Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump administration, is quoted as saying, “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”
Several Trump-backed think tanks, along with the Heritage Foundation, are laying the policy groundwork for the effort.
The idea behind the power grab is the “unitary executive theory”—or, in this case, an ultra-strong unitary executive—which relies on Article II of the Constitution, giving the president complete power over the Executive Branch.
The article quotes Kevin D. Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, saying, “The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic.”
These developments are very troubling, and IPI raised concerns about them when Barack Obama decided to bypass Congress in order to implement his policy agenda on climate change and the U.S. border.
We suggested that future presidents would take the Obama precedent and go farther. Trump tried to with his border wall that he couldn’t get Congress to pass, and Joe Biden did with his student loan forgiveness scam and immigration policies, just to name a few.
Now Trump apparently wants to make the imperial presidency an overt, rather than a covert, policy.
One can be very concerned about the calcification of the administrative state and bureaucratic efforts to undermine a president and his policies—both of which are real problems—without amassing more power to the executive. Conservatives should be about reducing government power, not increasing it.
The better approach is for Congress to stop vesting so much power in the various agencies to make decisions. And that can only be done by keeping the government and its agencies small and limited.
A limited government, not an unlimited presidency, is the only constitutionally appropriate solution.
July 18, 2023